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Back after a six year break

The +39 skipper joins his fellow crewmates at the Finn Gold Cup

Seeing Iain Percy's name on the entry list for the Finn Gold Cup is the equivalent to Ben Ainslie suddenly putting in an appearance out of the blue at a Laser World Championship. Once Olympic sailors, particularly those within Skandia Team GBR, decide upon a class they wish to compete in surely they can't just go off saiing whatever they want to willy nilly? So the theory goes at least.
"It is just a bit of a holiday - literally a holiday, just for a bit of fun," explains Percy of this breach of protocol. [Fun? Surely you're a professional man - where does fun come into it???] "All the boys from my team were going and they were trying to persuade me so I thought “why not?” It is good fun. And it is good training for the Star to get dynamic again."
While all the America's Cup campaigns in Valencia are bristling with Olympic heroes both past and present, none contains as many individuals with active campaigns as +39. While some might say this means they aren't as focussed on the Cup as perhaps their adversaries in Valencia, this was a deliberate move by team manager Luca Devoti, himself a Finn sailor, to get a group of people together who despite their lack of big boat experience already knew each other well, would immediately gel and carry across the Olympic sailing and perhaps even the Finn sailing ethos to the Cup.
The +39 sailing team could almost be described as the cream of the Finn class on tour as alongside Percy in Split are his fellow +39ers Australian Anthony Nossiter, German Michael Maier, Spain's Rafael Trujillo, Croatia's Karlo Kuret and Italian Piero Romeo.
When we speak to him Percy is both knackered and slightly grumpy. This is genuinely his first

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